Reading Politics in Calligraphy

Abstract

This article examines the 1965 debate over the authenticity of Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Lanting Collection” (Lanting ji xu). It argues that the seemingly academic debate in fact provided an opportunity for Mao Zedong and his associates to launch the Cultural Revolution. Although the Lanting Debate eventually failed its political mission, it created a false polyphony that encouraged intellectuals to engage in the subsequent debate over Yao Wenyuan’s class-struggle reading of Wu Han’s play, The Dismissal of Hai Rui, that marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The failed Lanting Debate thus contributed to the onset of the Cultural Revolution in its indirect and unique way and demonstrated the vulnerability and complexity of the revolutionary scholarship during the 1960s.